They’ll pry my flip phone from my cold dead hands;
In 2013, Procter & Gamble Co. was concerned about its online ads, including some that Leo Burnett made for Always feminine-care products. The company wanted to make sure people wouldn’t scroll right past them, according to Krister Karjalainen, a former P&G executive who tested some of the ads.
Through a partnership with tech company Sticky, now a unit of Sweden’s Tobii AB, P&G had tracked the eye movements of millions of consumers using their webcams. That allowed P&G to measure how the people, who were paid to participate in the research, were responding to the placement of its logos.
It’s behind the WSJ paywall, but if you hit ESC a few times as it begins to load, you may be able to grab the page. (Update — archived copy here h/t Patrick)
If you do consumer polling for Ipsos, they now do polls where the do the same, ask permission to watch your reaction to print, video, or Web ads they post. I use my pokerface. No tells.
Archived version of the article http://archive.is/lZooO
The first thing I did when I bought my new laptop was put electrical tape over the camera. Today’s apps have a lot of permissions built into them that people, without thinking, grant just to get the app going. Now that people are sharing back and forth between their devices they may be creating security issues. A permission that may make sense on your phone may be an invitation to identity theft or worse on your laptop. I also got a new phone and had to reinstall all my apps and I missed turning off a few permissions. The first time I had the phone in the car my loyalty card app was informing every time I was within range of one of my loyalty card stores and it was making merchandise offers for the stores. It’s kind of like the original Blade Runner when every time Harrison Ford walked by an advertising sign it called him by name and tried to sell him something. Needless to say, I shut that down pdq.
Just because your flip phone has no camera doesn’t make it safe from hacking or tracking.
“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” ~ Scott McNealy, 1998
“The privacy you’re concerned about is largely an illusion.” ~ Larry Ellison, 2001
You can nail more boards over the barn door all you like, but the horses are long gone.
Now I can explain all of that Bark box click bait. My dog has been using my computer!!!! XD